http://www.lenholgate.com/ Len Holgate's thoughts on this and that... Mainly test driven software development in C++ on Windows platforms... - Geek Speak en-us Len.Holgate@JetByte.com 2008-10-19T22:25:58+00:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000815.html I've been compiling with /W4 for some time now. I didn't realise that this wasn't the best you could get. There are some warnings which are not enabled by default and therefore aren't included in /W4. To enable these you... Posted by Len at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 815@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-10-19T22:25:58+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000812.html I've been meaning to build STLPort for Visual Studio 2008 for some time now but as the STL support that ships with Visual Studio has been improved the urgency to be able to use an alternative has reduced. Unfortunately STLPort... Posted by Len at 11:06 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 812@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-10-01T11:06:05+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000808.html I'm currently writing and testing a simple class that watches for system time changes. This is to allow an app to adjust some timers that it sets for absolute times in the future if the system time changes. The code's... Posted by Len at 06:05 PM | Comments (3) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 808@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-09-09T18:05:03+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000801.html There's an interesting article over on Dr. Dobb's about why writing lock free code is so hard. Herb Sutter takes some code from an article that Dr. Dobb's published a couple of months ago and pulls it apart and points... Posted by Len at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 801@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-08-06T12:06:50+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000793.html I stumbled on Gustavo Duarte's blog this week via this post about how lucky we are to be programmers. The post that led me to his blog is good stuff and has had lots of linkage this week. The rest... Posted by Len at 09:52 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 793@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-07-24T21:52:52+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000787.html Back in December and January I was working on the initial phases of a system to allow the development of custom Excel worksheet functions in managed code using the Excel XLL 'C' interface (Excel4v). Phase 1 finished with us having... Posted by Len at 08:55 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 787@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-06-25T08:55:20+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000781.html I found JP's blog whilst googling for some information on RVA forwarders in PE files. There's lots of good stuff there about reasonably low level Windows development, debugging, testing and API hooking. Recommended if you like the kind of stuff... Posted by Len at 12:30 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 781@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-05-06T12:30:51+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000780.html Back in October 2007 I sumarised my findings from getting my Win32 DebugAPI based debug engine working on x64. One of the strange things that I found at the time was this: When running a CLR app under the Win32... Posted by Len at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Debugging Tools , Geek Speak , Testing ]]> 780@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-05-01T16:43:42+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000778.html The endless torrent of bounce messages began again yesterday evening. Once again it was arount one email every 2 minutes or so. I turned on my laptop this morning expecting a few thousand emails to download and only a third... Posted by Len at 08:52 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 778@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-04-24T08:52:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000775.html There's an entry over on the Dr. Dobbs blog about testing and how you make sure that your tests are testing the right thing; effectively, who tests the test. There's a question at the end "What do you do?" and... Posted by Len at 10:24 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Testing ]]> 775@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Testing 2008-04-15T22:24:52+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000774.html There's an interesting article over on the Dr. Dobbs Code Talk blog; PQR - A Simple Design Pattern for Multicore Enterprise Applications. It documents a design that I'm pretty familiar with and one which has worked pretty well for me... Posted by Len at 05:44 PM | Comments (6) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 774@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-04-14T17:44:36+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000772.html It seems I'm not the only one to make mistakes with GetTickCount() based timer code, see: System.Threading.Timer fires immediately when specifying a large value for due time.... Posted by Len at 07:05 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 772@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-04-07T19:05:03+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000770.html This morning a new Ready NAS NV+ unit arrived, so now I have three. I didn't have a sudden change of heart about buying a development box, the power supply in my office NAS died on Thursday afternoon and buying... Posted by Len at 08:53 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 770@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-03-22T08:53:27+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000769.html As I mentioned a while back I'm using a pair of ReadyNAS NV+ RAID systems as my on-site data store and off-site backup. These are both working well and I'm pleased with the solution. After a few hickups and delays... Posted by Len at 09:22 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 769@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-03-18T09:22:46+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000768.html Whilst I've been away I've had a bug report for the TDD timer queue code that's available here. The report is completely correct and could result in a timer being scheduled out of sequence if it's scheduled around the point... Posted by Len at 09:15 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 768@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-03-18T09:15:18+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000766.html An interesting piece here from Phil Haack about why they decided to use an abstract base class rather than an interface. Versioning is always a complicated thing for library designers. I know that I'm lucky in that I don't have... Posted by Len at 01:20 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 766@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-02-21T13:20:47+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000765.html For some time I've had a class which implements asynchronous file writing. It's the basis for a logging class that some of my clients use. The class builds on several of the classes used in my server framework and uses... Posted by Len at 09:51 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 765@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-02-20T09:51:41+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000763.html I'm still reading the Richter book, highly recommended even if you've read one of the earlier versions. In fact it's possibly MORE highly recommended IF you've read one of the earlier versions... It seems that lots of things have changed... Posted by Len at 08:17 AM | Comments (4) | Categories: Books , Geek Speak , Socket Servers , Socket Servers ]]> 763@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-02-18T08:17:29+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000762.html One of the problems I currently have with CruiseControl.Net is that some of my tests spawn multiple processes; such as server tests which run the development environment, which runs a batch file to start a server (or two) and then... Posted by Len at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: CC.Net , Continuous Integration , Geek Speak ]]> 762@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-02-14T09:25:17+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000757.html Well, it's about a month since I started running Cruise Control .Net and things have settled down somewhat now and I can almost go a day or two without tweaking my configuration or being tempted to fix issues in Cruise... Posted by Len at 08:48 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: CC.Net , Continuous Integration , Geek Speak , Socket Servers ]]> 757@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Continuous Integration 2008-01-31T08:48:34+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000756.html Barry (who seems to have stopped blogging) recommended this blog to me; Coding The Markets. It's pretty good if you're into investment banking development stuff.... Posted by Len at 08:33 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 756@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-01-31T08:33:20+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000755.html If Richard Wolff is reading this then I can't reply to your emails as your ISP is bouncing my emails with this: Hi. This is the qmail-send program at ns.mgf4.net. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to... Posted by Len at 12:07 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 755@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2008-01-15T12:07:40+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000754.html Hacking CruiseControl.Net to work better for my specific circumstances (lots of projects that depend on lots of projects) has resulted in the following patches to revision 3607 of ccnet which I'm just about to submit to the developers. These patches... Posted by Len at 02:25 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: CC.Net , Continuous Integration , Geek Speak ]]> 754@http://www.lenholgate.com/ CC.Net 2008-01-14T14:25:19+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000751.html I'm working on the next releases of the licensed version of the socket server framework, and I now have continuous integration (of a sort) so my build and test problems are being minimised... BUT... Keeping Visual Studio 6 support in... Posted by Len at 09:23 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Socket Servers ]]> 751@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2008-01-10T09:23:40+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000747.html I am intending to check out some of the other build servers that people have been suggesting, but today I was too busy with real work so I just left a cut down version of my latest CruiseControl.Net configuration running... Posted by Len at 10:41 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: CC.Net , Continuous Integration , Geek Speak ]]> 747@http://www.lenholgate.com/ CC.Net 2008-01-03T22:41:20+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000746.html I've almost got something that works out of CruiseControl.Net. Once I'd hacked in some fixes for the project triggers and other stuff that didn't work the way I wanted it to I concentrated on generating the config files that I... Posted by Len at 06:46 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: CC.Net , Continuous Integration , Geek Speak ]]> 746@http://www.lenholgate.com/ CC.Net 2008-01-02T18:46:34+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000745.html I've been trying to get my code to build with CruiseControl.Net this week. It's taken longer than I'd hoped, but I'm almost there. It became easier when I switched from assuming various parts of CruiseControl.Net would "work as I expected... Posted by Len at 09:55 PM | Comments (5) | Categories: CC.Net , Continuous Integration , Geek Speak ]]> 745@http://www.lenholgate.com/ CC.Net 2007-12-21T21:55:06+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000744.html I'm currently working on two new releases of my socket server framework, the first is a simple release to add support for VS2008 and the second is the next "feature" release. Due to the number of projects and example servers... Posted by Len at 05:11 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: CC.Net , Continuous Integration , Geek Speak ]]> 744@http://www.lenholgate.com/ CC.Net 2007-12-18T17:11:29+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000742.html I picked up a book yesterday, Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista. Which seemed quite interesting, and was a nice slim volume that would slip into my hand luggage for my flight to Geneva on Friday night (yay first ski... Posted by Len at 10:02 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 742@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2007-12-13T22:02:59+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000741.html I removed the last version of "Norton Anti-Virus" (and all of the other stuff that I've been upgraded into over the years) from the last of my machines yesterday. I've replaced it with AVG, currently the free version to test... Posted by Len at 11:22 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]> 741@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2007-12-12T11:22:19+00:00